


fortune favors (false. it doesn't.)

by thychesters



Category: Uncharted (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Shambhala, a no good very bad time, elena's not feeling so hot and chloe's not having it, post-grenade explosion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-26
Updated: 2017-07-26
Packaged: 2018-12-07 09:32:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11620806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thychesters/pseuds/thychesters
Summary: or: you're just extremely unlucky and fate decided it wasn't your day.you aren’t the plucky girl who reforms the villain, the plucky girl who saves the day and gets the guy in the end; in fact, at this moment you feel anything but plucky.





	fortune favors (false. it doesn't.)

**Author's Note:**

> cross-posted from tumblr; originally written in second person and with no capitalization, and any mistakes that may have slipped through the cracks are my own. i'll admit i'm not the happiest i could be with some parts of it, so this may end up being reworked sometime in the near-future. 
> 
> i also may very well take off the nate/elena tag because it's mostly just mentioned in passing and/or hinted at, i know how much i hate the feeling of looking in the tag only to find something that just says "mentioned." lmao.
> 
> my first foray into the ao3 world of uncharted! hopefully elena and chloe have been done some justice. cheers.

Elena’s at least partially convinced Chloe’s going to end up dragging her corpse out of here—if she gets that far, that is. She tells her only a few more steps, just a little bit farther and then she can rest again, but—what is that saying?—every inch feels like a mile, and she’s more or less shuffling her feet as she moves along.

There’s the sound of screaming behind them, the rapid _pop pop_ noise of gunfire to accompany it, and she barely manages to turn her head, wait for one of those Guardians to pop up behind them and tear it clean off. She thinks there’s something that sounds like an explosion, and she goes to ask Chloe what’s happening but the words end up garbled, merge into a groan as she tugs on her wrist.

“One foot in front of the other, come on,” she says, hand slung low on her waist where her fingers wraps around her belt to hoist her up. Her hands are warm against her, and she thinks about asking if there’s anything behind them, if it’s Nate or one of those creatures or one of Lazarević’s men. “Left foot, right foot.”

Elena’s left foot goes, but her right hits a snag when the heel of her shoe catches on the uneven stone walkway and threatens to take them both down. Chloe drags her back up with another grunt, and she casts a glance toward the edge, toward the ravine with a bottom they cannot see.

She wonders where Nate is, what happened, if he’s alright. She tries not to dwell on it, and given how she can’t form a thought without wanting to scream in pain, it’s not hard to.

“Careful you don’t end up down there,” Chloe says, somewhere off to her right, at once so close but too far away.

“Would you?” she asks, and her head lolls for a moment as her face screws up, tries to remember which way is up and down. She has nothing to compare the pain to, no scale to look at and say yes, this falls under a 1, or this falls under a 10, or this falls under a 101. “Toss me over the side?”

“Oh, I was considering it,” she tells her, though the remark is made too offhand to sound serious. Elena can almost hear the shrug in her voice. Left, right. “I — sorry, sorry,” she says when her hand slips and her thumb digs into one of the flesh wounds that litters her side. It’s an unpleasant experience for the both of them.

She hums, brief and low, and the fingers that aren’t hanging uselessly by her side twitch, like she’s searching for hers or his, for an anchor. Tears burn at the corners of her eyes like little pinpricks and her head rests back on her shoulders as she looks skyward, tries to blink them away. She doesn’t know how much farther they have to go, whether they've made it halfway or are only a few paces from their starting point, where Nate left to go play hero and her first thought was _huh, don’t die._

“Chloe?” she says, and she doesn’t know how much time has passed. Her hand slips where it’s slick with blood, and she mumbles something like _sorry_. Her chin dips toward her chest, grants her a nice view of the pockmarks in her shirtfront, all the bloodstains that weren’t there before and her feet as one falters and the other doesn’t move at all. She wills it to, she thinks, idly wonder if it’s hers, if she can still feel it, if it’s there. “You...”

“Me,” she says, and Elena has to think on what she wanted to say for a minute. That’s a lot of blood. That’s a lot of blood that’s supposed to be in her, not outside.

She hums again, though it sounds more like a whimper. If she could just sit down for a minute, just long enough to catch her breath...

“Thanks. You don’t have to.”

She lists like she’s about to pitch forward, and Chloe grumbles, sinks her nails in and pulls her back into her.

“Oh no you don’t; we’re almost there,” she says, but almost there could mean five minutes, could mean an hour. She doesn’t think she has it in her for another hour’s worth of shuffling along, let alone five minutes. She takes in a breath and it shakes too much, rattles around inside of her. Part of her waits for the sound of it to come whistling out, escape through all the little holes in her side, like Chloe could press her fingers against them to adjust the pitch.

She’s just about dragging her at this point; where they started out strong she’s lost her steam, running on the reserves that are draining a little too rapidly for comfort. She’s cold, she wants to sit down for a moment, just a moment, even though the rational part of her that hasn’t bled out tells her not to, tells her she can’t.

Nate should be back by now, Nate has to be back by now. For one brief, fleeting moment, the one clear thought that makes it through is that she wants to see him again, even if it’s only one last time. It’s morbid, she knows that, but she can’t help but think about all the things left unsaid between them, all the loose ends they let fray and snap, and she can’t just leave it like that, like they—

Her left knee gives out first, followed by her right, and Chloe has no warning, no time to brace herself before they’re both going down in an unceremonious heap and she cries out, screams and grits her teeth as Chloe curses and quickly detangles herself, only causing more pain when she rolls her over onto her back.

Elena stares up at the sky blindly, tears sliding down her temples before vanishing into her hairline. She—

“—need to stay with me, sunshine, come on,” Chloe’s saying as she comes back to, though she has no inkling of an idea how long she was out for. Her breath sounds like a wheeze as she searches her face, and Chloe’s mouth is set into a stern line as she swims in and out of focus. “Gave us a scare, there.”

_Us_ , she says, and she wants to know who else is there. Did they get out? Did Nate come back?

“Uh,” is the best she can do, and even that sounds like a whimper. Elena’s never much cared for melodrama, but she’s rather convinced that this is the part where she dies. Her last words are not words at all, but gurgles and whimpers as she bleeds out on stone in a city that only existed in myth, cold and covered in her own blood because she, too, tried to play hero.

“That’s the spirit,” she mutters, fingers flitting over her like she’s about to work magic, hands passing over wounds like she could heal them by thought alone rather than assessing the damage. Elena already knows what it is, and she’s ready to drift off again. Maybe this time, she doesn’t come to. Chloe says something like _shock?_ and part of her wants to say no, no she’s not really all that shocked, because this was a Nathan Drake adventure, and when has that ever ended well? She doesn’t know if the bleeding’s stopped, if it’s going to keep going until she have nothing left to give, and Chloe’s palm is slick and shiny and bright red when her vision circles back around from taking in nothing.

“Chloe,” she says in a voice that sounds nothing like her own. It’s too raw, too far away, and then she wonders if she said anything at all. “Go.”

“I already said I wasn’t, so you’ll need to get over that,” she tells her, and if there’s a bite to her tone, Elena doesn’t pick up on it. Chloe moves like she plans on picking her up, carrying her out of the city herself, and she doesn’t have the willpower to reach up to push her away. It’s futile, anyway. She can’t drag her down with her.

“You gotta promise me if it comes to it, you leave,” she gets out, and it’s the most words she's managed to string together since Nate dove into oblivion and Chloe started dragging her away. “Do what... you need to.”

Her expression hardens, and her eyes look flat and dull, or maybe that’s just her. Elena goes to close hers, but she needs to see her face, needs her to know, to understand.

“You’re joking. I’m not going to put one between your eyes.”

Her initial plan was for her to leave her here, get out while she still could, drag Nate along with her in the process if she needed to, because there was no sense in all of them dying. If they’re caught off guard now, she won’t be able to provide much by way of defense. And maybe she’s selfish, maybe she wants to tell her that she’s scared, that she’d rather opt for quick and easy rather than slow and painful. At this rate there’s a high chance she’s not moving from this spot, anyhow.

“Not my plan. But if you have to... to...” She would sound so much more sure of herself if she wasn’t whimpering and grimacing. “Promise me you—”

“I don’t make promises I don’t intend on keeping, sunshine.” Her jaw clenches with a slow, minute shake of her head. “What is it with you people and your bloody heroics?”

_Comes with the territory_ , she wants to say. Comes with the misadventure and some foolhardy notion to do good, especially in the middle of things going to shit. A good example in case in point is Nate, she wants to say, who went off to go face a warlord currently ingesting mythological tree sap head-on, and wouldn’t take no for an answer when Chloe called him out on being an idiot. Ha, she likes Chloe. She almost smiles. But Nate’s heroics have gotten him beaten up and blown up and shot, and he hasn’t come back yet.

“Stupid,” she says.

“Glad we’re on the same page there, at least,” Chloe says, and her palm presses down on her stomach like she’s trying to staunch the bleeding. For a second her gaze flickers away, somewhere back the way they came and she can’t see.

“Why?” she asks, and doesn’t get much beyond that. The two of them are strangers, brought together by run-ins and coincidence, both following a crazed war criminal for their own reasons. Her hair sticks to her face, and her gaze cuts to her hands, her stomach, her side, all the blood that’s there but isn’t supposed to be. “Jeff?”

Elena hears her say something along the lines of _different_ when she says his name, but she doesn’t elaborate on it. Another scenario, another risk, maybe. 

“Contrary to what you may think, I actually like you,” she says, matter-of-factly. The idea warms her, almost, lying cold and bloody on stone. Elena thinks she nods, or tries to. “Besides, he’d never forgive me if I didn’t, and I don’t want to have to put up with his moping.”

“Good. Don’t hate you,” she tells her, because she doesn’t.

“Well isn’t that nice of you,” she says, and the world rumbles and shakes beneath her. Elena doesn’t recall the stages of shock, not offhand. Her expression shifts again, despite her trying to keep it neutral. “And here I was thinking you were waiting for the right moment to push me off the ledge yourself out of bitterness and jealousy.”

The corner of her mouth twitches as it tries to form a smile, though her energy reserves are mainly preoccupied with trying to stay focused and breathing.

“No, not over a—a guy I dumped.” Her breath is still shaky, weak and faltering along with her voice, but Chloe's sudden laugh is as loud as it is abrupt, almost a bark as her head snaps back and then forward again.

“ _I knew it,_ ” she says, and she says something else, goes on for a moment, but then it all blurs together before fading entirely. Gravel and dirt shift as she does, the sound reaching her ears as blood roars in them, a half-second after she shouts, and she closes her eyes for a moment, just a moment, enough to try to get her bearings again, with a slow, uneven breath. Almost there, she said, all she—

—cries out when she’s lifted off the ground again, part pain, part rage, part fear. Her center of balance is all thrown off as she leans back into Chloe, wants to tell her to drop her and leave her, God, just _go_ already, and then Nate’s hoisting her up into the circle of his arms, blood soaking into his shirtfront. He’s warm against her, a solid weight, and as much as she appreciates it and the close proximity, she wants to pound her fists against his chest, scream and cry at every step he takes that’s a little too fast, a leap that’s a little too overzealous because God dammit, Nate, it hurts, it hurts.

He offers a string apologies at each one, murmurs in a voice that doesn’t sound like his, and it’s then that she realizes she never said she was sor


End file.
